DDoS attacks can cause real damage. It won't be legalized for the same reasons (albeit smaller scale) that setting cars on fire won't be recognized as a form of legal protest.

I always found that to be the most disgusting thing about the London riots. They're (supposedly) protesting the lack of jobs and poor economic conditions for the lower "class" by destroying small businesses' shop winows, stealing from said shops and setting random cars (that could belong to someone in their EXACT same financial situation) on fire.

These are the people who Made Moot time person of the year, while simultaneously making the first letters of the list spell out "Marble Cake Also The Game" (That's right, you just lost, and so did I, live with it. You got 30 minutes to forget now.).

These are also the people who gathered tens of thousands of people world wide to protest the cult Scientology (I was there in Toronto).

Will it happen? Will they get it legalized, I personally doubt it, but only time will tell, and if they do get the sigs they need (of which I am 100% sure that they will, in a matter days, if not hours) this petition will cross an important White House staffer's desk, and they'll have to respond to it regardless.

There's really no legal way to picket a website, as has been mentioned here. You can post nasty messages (which is only possible on places with comments sections or forums, is fairly easily removed, and may not even be acknowledged or affect the target in any way), you can troll them with some of the stunningly ill-conceived digital copyright laws kicking around out there (often not applicable), or you can DDoS.

Now, there are people out there who disapprove of protesting of any kind (Hi LysanderNemoinis!), at least when it's against things they don't want to see protested against. These people are wrong. Even unpopular opinions should be freely aired, and turnout for protests can make a good point as to just how many people are ticked off enough to get out there and wave cardboard, or camp for weeks on end while the police violate their own rules of engagement.

*Provided* the DDoS attacks are coming from computers actually owned by the people conducting the attack, then it too could be an accurate indicator of just how many people a given web target's owners have managed to piss off, while causing no more than a short-lived disruption of the site's operations.

Ken Sapp:Performing a DDoS attack is a way to cause damage to private property and just as the First Amendment does not give protestors the right to intrude on or destroy private property it also wouldn't allow an electronic form of destruction. If they want to protest they are more than welcome to build their own websites to spread their message as well as using forums, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

Except DDOS attacks are harmless. There is no destruction of anything going on. This is no different than getting a crowd to prevent people from entering a store.

Now granted, it's much easier to ddos than to block people from entering a store.

Lucky Godzilla:Anonymous, protecting the freedom of the internet by blocking one web site at a time

Thinking about it, anonymous should just do the whole protest like the student ones done in the past. But just have their computers with multiple browsers randomly clicking on parts of government websites. Public parks, walkways, courthouses, and even government buildings are legal places to protest so it could hold water for DDOS attacks, If there was at least 10 people in congress that uses a computer other then to get prostitutes and to have someone else make speeches for them. On a funny note if it does pass the next one will legitimize griefing on video games and then they could even make the call for cursing to be allowed by FCC. On second thought I would support cursing being allowed on tv and radio.

That almost makes sense, except its rather common for a DDoS to involved a botnet or what-have-you and they tend to cause damage to whatever place they are targeted against. But those things are not inherent to the act are they? Maybe they actually do have a point.

No, DDOS is a form of protest in GERMANY. It is not a perfectly reasonable form of protest as it is someone from OUTSIDE a company preventing a company from conducting its business. It is NOTHING like a strike which are workers who are refusing to work, and thus are not being paid. Certainly the company is losing out on productivity in this case but it is via workers INACTION and is a civil case, not a criminal one.

It is called a DDOS ATTACK for a reason. A strike is a protest. A DDOS attack does cause damage. A day a company can not conduct its business with the public can cost large amounts in potential lost revenue AND the costs of attempting to counter the DDOS attacks via IT services. Not to mention the sudden increased workload on the company's other avenues of communication such as phone based customer service.

I was thinking more along the lines of "stressing the server until it breaks" (which can happen, make no mistake, as you're overloading the server until it causes errors). Which scales up to, as I said, setting a car on fire IRL.

Also, what the heck is with your first two lines? I can't make heads or tails of them.

Not that im a supporter in any way but as others have stated above what they do is block people from accessing a business by barring the entrances which is illegal. If you look at their activity its closer in nature to a strike rather than a protest.

Edit: you know what never mind i just remembered that even strikers cant legally bar people from entering either so ANON is kinda screwed in this case, but the US gov could always invite them to discuss this issue in person with ANON :).

Ken Sapp:Performing a DDoS attack is a way to cause damage to private property and just as the First Amendment does not give protestors the right to intrude on or destroy private property it also wouldn't allow an electronic form of destruction. If they want to protest they are more than welcome to build their own websites to spread their message as well as using forums, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.

Except DDOS attacks are harmless. There is no destruction of anything going on. This is no different than getting a crowd to prevent people from entering a store.

Now granted, it's much easier to ddos than to block people from entering a store.

DDoS attacks are not harmless. Is it legal for protestors to chain and padlock the doors of a store as part of their protest? To spray paint slogans on the building? No. Protestors are limited to speech, displaying signs, and other forms of peacefully conveying their message on public property. If they intrude into private property or cause damage they can be held liable and removed and/or arrested by law enforcement. If a group were protesting Wal-Mart and carried their presence into the parking lot (private property), Wal-Mart would be completely within their rights to have the trespassers removed if they refused to leave.

Considering botnets are frequently involved, which are most of the time if not all the time hacked computers I'd say there definitely is hacking going on.

If it was purely for DDoS attacks in which only computers personally owned by the 'protesters' are used then it might be worth talking about, not sure if it should actually become legal though but I do think it warrants a discussion by experts.

As for DDoS attacks causing damage, sure they do. But let's stop with the idiotic comparisons to cars catching fire and spraying slogans on the sides of buildings. Those comparisons only become relevant the moment my car or wall receives a reset button which instantly restores all damage done to it without cost save the service lost whilst it was damaged.

If even to say, that I agree with the protesting part, which I don't. It seems like it would make it legal to just DDoS some person cause say, they got my headshots then you in a game of Counter Strike source, cause that happened to me. Or say, you were banned from a server cause you excessively swore and broke the words, cause that's again, happened to me. It just seems silly. Protesting is saying no, without disrupting, this is just essentially barricading a person's house from the outside.

An important point here is that even if the US government has a seizure and somehow decides its valid and passes the request, that would only protect them attacking US sites. No other country would do that and as soon as they attack a non US server they'd be in just as much trouble, sometimes far more. US law doesn't mean anything outside the US.

Ronack:here's where protest becomes legal: When it doesn't interfere with the daily goings of lives. So, DDoS attacks are NOT and will NEVER be legal.

While I agree with everyone that this will never happen and is likely meant more to start a dialogue (much like this one), I do feel I have to point out that the whole idea of a protest is to interfere with daily goings-on. If an it didn't cause some time of a problem for those being protested, it wouldn't accomplish a thing. Boycotts hurt businesses & cost them money; that's the point. They are supposed to be disruptive.

Again, not saying I entirely agree with DDoS on an ethical level, but there is a definite logical point to be made here.

Sidebar: Many people on The Escapist forums & elsewhere seem to enjoy hating on Anonymous when it's convenient. I didn't see anyone here complaining when they outed those rapists in Stuebenville, when they avidly protested SOPA, or the laundry list of other public services they've performed. Just throwing that out there

Zombie_Moogle:Sidebar: Many people on The Escapist forums & elsewhere seem to enjoy hating on Anonymous when it's convenient. I didn't see anyone here complaining when they outed those rapists in Stuebenville, when they avidly protested SOPA, or the laundry list of other public services they've performed. Just throwing that out there

What makes you say that? I believe the fair trial should take place in cases including rape, and Anon had no part in the debate about the US internet freedom restricting laws. Outside of some cyber-vandalism that did more harm than good anyway.

Mostly it went "See? Anonymous is screwing around again. This is why we need to regulate the internet strictly".

No, this does NOT have any legal grounds. PERIOD. The First Amendment grants the People the right to "peaceably assemble." Impeding someone's progress, which a DDoS attack does, does not qualify as assembling peaceably. It's just like how an environmentalist group can protest CO2 emissions by holding signs on the side of the road, but they can't stand in the middle of the road and block traffic.

Given that I can't think of anyway to protest something online that's less damaging then a DDoS, I'd be alright with this. It's annoying when a site I want to use has been DDoS'd, but it's annoying when anything I want to do is disrupted by protesters.

It is an interesting thought. Think about it, if union thugs can use physical force to block entry to and/or shut down your business, why should DDoS be illegal?

Why should all those other forms of protest out there who do far more obstruction and damage than DDoS get a free pass in court? I think the only thing singling DDoS out is the lack of threat posed by enforcement turning a protest into a bloody riot.

RicoADF:An important point here is that even if the US government has a seizure and somehow decides its valid and passes the request, that would only protect them attacking US sites. No other country would do that and as soon as they attack a non US server they'd be in just as much trouble, sometimes far more. US law doesn't mean anything outside the US.

There's two basic kinds of DDoS attacks, one is a flood of network traffic, the other abuses slow heavy resources on the website itself.

If you have a page that is demanding on server resources to generate (heavy SQL queries without caching/etc), then you can send many requests to the page to overwhelm whatever slow backend service it is using - lagging or crashing anything else that relies on that service (locking up the database). This is typically what happens when a site is overwhelmed from "normal" traffic. It can be mitigated with pro-active filtering and caching on the application side.

The much more common form of DDoS is a pure network flood of half open TCP connections or page requests as fast as possible. These types of floods do not wait or care about a server response, and typically will even change their reply route so the source computer doesn't receive the response traffic (Sometimes the source was another target similar to email "Joe Jobbing"/backscatter)

Basically a series of incoming requests that say "HI GIMME THE WEB PAGE" or "HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET HEY I NEED A TCP SOCKET" and start asking for the page again before they even get the first response. This behavior is NOTHING like mashing F5 on a website, it's much more damaging. There's various techniques to detect false source addresses and either ignore or "tarpit" the sender so they get stuck on the first request without opening a second.

When the latter form of DDoS attack is used, it has the potential to not just take down the target website, but every computer on its network segment as your upstream gateway router's connection tracking buckets get overwhelmed and it starts dropping any packet routing though. Modern gateways and firewalls are much more robust about handling this (most DDoS attacks these days are fairly hard to maintain beyond a few hours for this reason - Firewall heuristics have come a long way in the last 6 years or so).

ANY DDoS attack at all wastes the time of people at data centers and people running the servers (NOT the same people putting the content on the sites that you hate) as they lock things down and do forensics.

Also, for those proud "hackers", it's pretty much the least skilled way to attack a site unless you wrote the software behind the botnet yourself. Almost all of them re-purpose some existing bot and spam links on IRC/etc until they get enough drones to do a fancier version of the Windows 95 ping of death. The client impact is similar to spamming long lines of text in your online game of choice so people can't use the chat until the GM comes and bans you. Devastating.

If you want to have fun dealing with kiddie attacks, check out IRC networks sometime. Being the places where bored teenage computer nerds hang out and play with their bot control channels, they attract more such attacks then the majority of "large" websites do. The tiny IRC network that I run a server on would deal with several random DDoS attacks a month for several years. This is before the Escapist even existed, 3 months or so of having an IRC network with a few large channels (anime fansubbers and browser game communities in our case) engendered more DDoS attempts then the entire lifetime of our sites. Such behavior was so prevalent that the majority of data centers offering dedicated server hosting would outright ban any servers participating in an IRC network due to the amount of attacks they drew. As mentioned above though, firewalls are better at detecting bad traffic these days, so it's not nearly as common.

Looking at how many sigs it has now (just over 1000) and how many it needs by Feb. (over 2500) it's not looking like this is going to fail.

You would think that anons would be in a frenzy signing it. I suspect that they don't really want it to be legal because then DDos attacks would be "just another boring way of protesting" and so it would completely remove the anarchistic, wild, revolutionary edge that anonymous enjoys.

Signed it then looked through the other petitions on the site and facepalmed. There's one petition that is simply titled "RESIGN!" Also funny:

"Replace anti-gay Pastor Louie Giglio for the benediction at the inauguration with a pro-LGBT member of the clergy."Replace someone who disagrees with me with someone who does is the message I get from this

"authorize the production of a recurring television program featuring Vice President Joe Biden"Reminds me of the show "That's my Bush" because George Bush was funny enough to have an animated show made about him.

"Direct the United States Mint to make a single platinum trillion dollar coin!"We already laughed at this in R&P. Imagine if you dropped that while crossing the street and it rolled into a sewer.

Alright this one I need to mock in full"Is the right to own a gun more important than the right for a child to live?We want tighter gun control laws to be enforced immediately.

A complete ban on assault weapons and multiple bullet containing weapons."Multiple bullet containing weapons? Well guess it's back to flintlocks for home defense.

"Direct the United States Mint to make a single platinum trillion dollar coin!"We already laughed at this in R&P. Imagine if you dropped that while crossing the street and it rolled into a sewer.

Alright this one I need to mock in full"Is the right to own a gun more important than the right for a child to live?We want tighter gun control laws to be enforced immediately.

A complete ban on assault weapons and multiple bullet containing weapons."Multiple bullet containing weapons? Well guess it's back to flintlocks for home defense.

The trillion-dollar coin thing is a way to circumvent the U.S. Debt ceiling. Its stupid but it would work.

Shotguns and bolt-action rifles can be loaded a bullet at a time, and some don't even come equipped with magazines. a single-shot bolt-action rifle is more than enough for hunting. Personally, I think a shotgun with a trigger lock is a more intimidating form of home defense than a small-caliber handgun. Restricting guns so that the police and the military are the only entities that can legally carry anything larger than a six-or-seven round magazine would definately help curb prolonged standoffs or gun battles. I think the idea is actually sound, it just needs to be reqritten so it doesn't SOUND so stupid.

lastly, strikes and lockouts are a protected form of protest between workers and their employers. Ironically, the employees of Amazon.com or Google might have a legal argument for a DDoS attack during a LEGAL strike but I don't see that actually happening. Right now in Canada, the "Idle No More" protests are occasionally blocking train tracks, highways and other major transport routes for hours at a time. - a form of protest going back decades, if not longer in Canada.

Frankly, organizing people to continually hit F5 is probably the legal move whereas any DDoS application is not.

........... So the group all about anonymity.......... wants you to put your name to a form............ they are going to send to the government..........................................................*head implodes*

slash2x:........... So the group all about anonymity.......... wants you to put your name to a form............ they are going to send to the government..........................................................*head implodes*

This wins the thread. Seriously the irony is really quite exquisite.

There are a few folks who have been saying that the German courts have deemed DDoS attacks a legal form of protest. Courts make stupid rulings all the time. Just because the courts in one country make this act of vandalism legal does not make it valid. Let them DDoS German sites all they want. That's the problem of the people who host sites in Germany and that is their fight to win or lose. Maybe in the eventual appeal they will get some judges who are actually intelligent enough to see what is wrong here but what Germany did is not relevant to what the US or other countries are doing.

Last I checked union thugs were not allowed to block access to their work sites. Only delay it. An argument could be made that DDoS is the same thing except Anonymous is not working at these places and others have mentioned that the underlying server damage is more troubling than is commonly recognized. So yeah, not legit. Especially since botnets are still involved.

I think the Anons raise an important point. While there may be crucial differences between a sit-in and a DDos attack, the idea of a virtual form of protest is a compelling one. Some dissenters mentioned that "if it's worth protesting, then it's worth protesting in person" [sic] but if turning up in person means being brutalized, tear gassed and/or shot at; perhaps it's not quite as worth it to some people.

Add to that fact that Anon have turned their attentions to global situations and... Well, when Anonymous helped Egypt back onto the internet, giving Government dissenters a renewed voice and facilitating the free flow of information; would they have been better off buying plane tickets to a slaughterhouse?

To get back on track, I believe that the denizens of this world grow increasingly connected and globally aware. It would be absurd to think that the most efficacious form of protest for a global community would be a physically manifest one. I willingly concede that a DDos attack cannot, in all probability, constitute a legitimate form of protest, but what if an analogue of it could? If I were to organize a large number of people to all sit in front of their computers and manually request data from a website, then those people would be effectively "manually DDos-ing" that site. Nothing illegal would be taking place and no damage (other than the temporary loss of service) would be taking place. I'd argue that such action would be a legitimate "electronic sit-in" and the fact that it would only work by virtue of sheer numbers might add credence to the point in question.

That however raises another important notion. What if I feel strongly about something I perceive as a strong political injustice - and what if only say a hundred people actually give a fuck about it. Legality and morality aside, would it be more efficacious to spend years attempting to raise awareness - or would it be more prudent to wheel out something akin to LOIC and make headline news the following day?

As an aside, I'd like to point out the hypocrisy in breaking up peaceful protests with batons and tear gas; and also the American Government's usage of DDos to cripple websites that it has a problem with.

I guess that last thought was born of the idea that groups like Anon would be fighting a very lopsided battle if they always stayed within the bounds of legality. The Governments and corporations do not play fair - why should the resistance?